In the tech industry, it’s important to get a gauge of what companies are paying and what other developers are earning. It’s important because the ranges attached to job descriptions these days vary so significantly that you wouldn’t even know where to begin in negotiation or understanding what’s a fair salary. 

You’ll see what I mean about the salary ranges when you read this list. But I’m not here to answer the question of how much you should earn but to share which tech companies pay their developers the highest salaries. If you want one of the best-paying jobs in technology, I suggest you keep an eye on these companies (I’ll let you know their tech stack so you can start learning!).

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Highest paying tech companies

We’ve grouped companies by industry/type. You can see that AI and Data companies are dominating the top ten. We’ll certainly see more AI companies emerging over the next few years and muscling out some of these legacy tech companies like Salesforce. It’s also a welcomed surprise that we don’t see more FAANG companies on the list. 

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1. Netflix

Netflix uses a microservices setup and is famous for its cloud-based infrastructure, mostly working with Amazon Web Services (AWS). They use cool tech like Java, JavaScript, Python, and Kotlin, and even contribute to open-source projects (Hadoop, Hive, Pig, Parquet, Presto, and Spark). Software engineer salaries at Netflix are some of the highest, averaging around $300,000 to $400,000, with bonuses and stock options thrown in.

2. Mashgin

Mashgin is a relatively unknown company based in Palo Alto. They create AI-driven self-checkout systems for retail and hospitality businesses. We’ve all used self-checkout grocery systems, they are trash — that’s where Mashgin comes in, using computer and machine learning to recognise products, making checkout a breeze. If you’ve ever been to Uniqlo, it’s a similar experience, no scanning, the computer understands what you have and rings you up. It looks like devs at Mashgin work with Python and C/C++ in a Linux environment. Software engineers at Mashgin have at least 8+ years of experience and earn somewhere between $250,000 and $600,000.

3. OpenAI

Everyone has heard about OpenAI by now. From what it looks like, on LinkedIn, they are in the process of scaling like crazy. There are 40+ open positions (mostly engineering). OpenAI has a bunch of products including the popular ChatGPT and DALL-E. They are hiring elite software engineers skilled in Python, TensorFlow, and PyTorch for their machine learning and deep learning projects. And the pay is quite good as well, salaries at OpenAI can range from $200,000 to $370,000, depending on experience and the specific role.

4. AtoB

This is the fourth highest-paying company for software engineers in America (so essentially 4th in the world) but no one seems to have heard of it. It’s the same for many software companies working in the transport niche. AtoB helps transport companies save money on fuel. They’ve created a driver management app that routes drivers to the lowest-priced fuel stations. It looks like software engineers at AtoB are working with JavaScript, React, and React Native on the front end and Rails, Python, and NodeJS on the backend. They hire developers with at least 5 years of experience and offer salaries ranging from $200,000 to $350,000. 

5. Datavant

Data companies pay extremely well. That’s why there are three of them on this list. There will always be some data company based out of San Francisco offering incredibly high salaries whether you are in the US or in Europe. Datavant is one of those companies. They are a healthcare tech company that securely connects and shares data across organizations to improve patient care and decision-making. Datavant’s tech stack includes AWS, Python, Javascript, Java, Git, and Snowflake. They are offering software engineer salaries from $150,000 to $350,000

6. Airtable

If you don’t know Airtable, it’s a software company that provides a flexible and powerful spreadsheet database platform for organising, collaborating, and automating various workflows. According to compensation.io, software engineers are getting paid between $228,000 - $323,000 a year. To work on the core product you’ll have to have 4+ years of experience in full-stack web development. Airtable’s stack is quite generic (AWS, Node.js, and SQL to React, HTML., and CSS) so it’ll fit with a lot of developers out there. 

7. Datadog

Datadog is probably one of the biggest companies on this list after Netflix and Salesforce. They are worldwide, so employment options aren't limited to just San Francisco. Developers are making anywhere from $130k to $300k per year. Looking at the job postings, Datadog prefers developers with experience in Go, C, or Python on the front end and Apache Cassandra, PostgreSQL, and Kafka on the backend. 

8. Salesforce

Not only is Salesforce a high-paying company but they are also consistently one of the top-rated companies (by employees) in Europe. Salesforce is the leading customer relationship management platform (whatever that means!) and they pay handsomely. Developers can generally expect to earn between $133,000 to $280,000. Developers are expected to work with JavaScript, Java, and Apex (which is Saleforce’s own language). But really it’s going to depend on what product in their huge suite you’ll be working on — they own Tableau and Slack plus a bunch of cloud products. 

9. VMware

VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology, providing virtualisation solutions and software-defined data centers. VMware is another huge company based out of Palo Alto with offices in almost every major city worldwide. They’ve got over 34,000 employees and a market cap of around $53 billion. According to recent job postings, software engineers working for VMware can earn between $154,000 and $277,000. A software engineer working at VMware is expected to know Go and/ or Java and be familiar with Kaftka, REST/JSON, gRPC/protobuf, Kubernetes, and Docker. 

10. Kodiak Robotics

Kodiak Robotics is a technology company focused on developing autonomous trucking solutions. They work on areas such as computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and sensor fusion. Software developers working for KR are skilled in Python, C++, ROS (Robot Operating System), and machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch. Devs are earning between $175,000 and $275,000.